People of #ontario should be up in arms about this massive #taxpayer subsidy to already lucrative residential developments and extremely wealthy #developers. The #greenbelt sell-off is such obvious #corruption that this developer fee hand out is not getting much attention, but Guelph and Hamilton both already projected big property tax hikes in response to #Bill23 #onpoli
Reminder that American tech companies put profits over democracy, every single time:
From Quartz: “Anti-government protests flared in several Chinese cities and on college campuses over the weekend. But the country’s most widespread show of public dissent in decades will have to manage without a crucial communication tool, because Apple restricted its use in China earlier this month.”
When I turned 70, I thought, “Well, that’s it. I’ve had a great career, but it’s winding down.”
Boy, was I wrong. I found social media, and then a second wind at my sails in my 70s! I made my Broadway debut at 78, and I’ll make my London debut at 85.
Life is truly wonderful and magical.
If you’re in London, come see me in Allegiance starting in January. Tix here: https://allegiancemusical.com
OK, so this is interesting. Some major organizations have now set up their own Mastodon instances:
European Union: EU Voice >>> https://social.network.europa.eu/explore
German gov: Explore social.bund.de >>> https://social.bund.de/explore
Internet Archive: Explore Internet Archive >>> https://mastodon.archive.org/explore
as sad as i am about the rapid destruction of twitter, the (re)surge in blogs and newsletters has been lovely
back to the #indieweb!
Having run my own test mastodon server, I can tell you that boosting is REALLY important. That's how posts propagate between servers that are not federated together.
I may get a bit technical, and it can be hard to describe but it's something like this:
Let's say that you have 2 servers, A and B that are not connected. They have their own federated timelines that is vastly different.
let's assume they have their users @a@A and @b@B that are mutuals. If user @a@A sees something interesting on theirs federated timeline and boosts it, user @b@B will see that on their own home page. But more importantly server B will now know about and download that post, and everyone else on B server will be able to see that post on their own federated timeline!
And that's why you boost, guys! It helps posts to spread.
@marcelias I recommend movetodon.org to see who among your Twitter flock exhibits mastodon addresses. Here are lists of academics hereabouts; journalists also in there. https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon
Hopefully someone else can fill in the details but if I remember correctly, 20 or 25 years back there was a short-lived plan to create a federally-funded citation database along the lines of the Web of Science.
Under fierce lobbying pressure from ISI and other informatics providers, the project was scrapped. We are still presuming for that short-sightedness today.
Is there much Markey can do here, especially given the composition of the House in the next Congress? I'm also not sure there's much Markey can do to regulate a privately owned website, and I'm not sure the government should even have that degree of power.
I think #Congress and other government agencies should start up their own #Mastodon or other #ActivityPub based servers if they are serious about addressing this issue, as that would actually help address it. Complaining to Musk (who won't listen anyway) and grandstanding about doing things they cannot and should not do, on the other hand, does nothing.
@jeffjarvis Tried to make the positive case for everyone to consider moving, here:
Musk reportedly berating advertisers
"Musk, meanwhile, has sought to personally call chief executives of some brands that have curbed advertising in order to berate them, according to one senior industry figure, leading others to instead reduce their spend to the bare minimum required so as to avoid further confrontation"
I wonder what #JaronLanier thinks of #Fediverse, or if he is aware of it yet.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/27/jaron-lanier-tech-threat-humanity-twitter-social-media
5.4 million Twitter users' stolen data leaked online — more shared privately
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/54-million-twitter-users-stolen-data-leaked-online-more-shared-privately/
#Security
So today I learned that if you really want to torture your intro to cybersecurity students, the best thing to do is to teach the course, then near the end make them watch two Hollywood portrayals of hacking and write a paper on each comparing them to real-life cybersecurity.
Short version: I'm 3 minutes into Live Free or Die Hard and I already hate it.
(To be fair, it's not actually torture. It's a fun assignment, and I actually think @CSCPROF did a really good job with this assignment. Still, I don't think I'm ever going to speak positively of this particular movie.)
Mathematics Ph.D. Likes hanging out with almost everyone regardless of political views or anything else.
Akkoma: @ML2